Fortinet announced Tuesday that the State of South Dakota Department of Education has purchased more than 200 Fortinet security appliances. The solutions are replacing the state's previous K-12 solution to help provide firewall protection and Web content filtering for its network of more than 123,000 users, which include students, faculty and staff. The Bureau of Information and Telecommunications, through the South Dakota Department of Education, provides technology services for the K-12 community. These services include wide area networking (WAN), Internet, distance learning, video conferencing, e-mail, Web hosting, a student information system, technology consulting and cyber security services. BIT decided to look at other solutions when their previous solution was having problems meeting security performance and reporting requirements. Having looked at multiple vendors, BIT selected Fortinet for its ability to provide a scalable product suite that integrated firewall and Web content filtering for individual schools to report on Internet usage. BIT is using a full spectrum of Fortinet's multi-threat security appliance models, to help protect them from malicious attacks against critical network data such as student records, grades and personnel files as well as safeguard all students, faculty and staff from inappropriate Web site content.